Ohio Switching Tests Again

DDN:
Ohio switching tests again for students

Schools will still teach Common Core standards, but math, English tests will change.

By Jeremy P. Kelley - Staff Writer

The longer, tougher PARCC school tests, criticized by many as too time-consuming and full of technological glitches, are gone from Ohio after one year — before students and schools even know their scores.

Now the state will begin a 10-month sprint to design new English and math tests and train schools to administer those tests next spring. That’s about one-third as long as Ohio and its schools had to prepare for PARCC (the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers).

The new tests will come from the American Institutes for Research (AIR), which designed the science and social studies tests Ohio students took for the first time this year. Ohio education officials said Wednesday that the state has just begun talking to AIR about adding the new tests.

The major switch comes as a result of the state budget bill, where the Ohio legislature and Gov. John Kasich retained the Common Core state learning standards, but prohibited Ohio from using tests from PARCC to measure students’ performance.

“As specified in the budget, these tests will be shorter than those given last year, will be offered in a single testing window in the spring, and will put all of our assessments on one (technology) platform,” said state school Superintendent Richard Ross. “But I want to be clear. We will not be purchasing off-the-shelf tests from AIR. Ohio educators will be working with them to develop Ohio tests.”

According to the Education Commission of the States, AIR tests in English and math were used in only three states this school year — Arizona, Florida and Utah. But Ross said Ohio has a 10-year relationship with AIR, which was involved in development of previous Ohio state tests.

Ohio used the Ohio Achievement Assessments to test most students in 2013-14, then the PARCC tests in 2014-15, and will now use the AIR tests in 2015-16. Many school officials have complained about Ohio’s seemingly nonstop changes to education standards, testing, technology, graduation requirements, teacher evaluations and more.

“This makes me a little nervous as a testing coordinator because that means a new mandate comes along,” said Fairfield schools secondary curriculum coordinator Katie Pospisil. “We have to relearn it, and retrain students and staff.”

There were widespread complaints this school year about the length of the PARCC tests, the number of days tied up in testing, the computer testing application crashing, and to a lesser extent, the academic content of the tests.

A committee led by State Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, asked PARCC to make a number of changes in its tests for next year. PARCC agreed, but many Ohio legislators said PARCC’s response didn’t shave off enough testing time.

Lehner, chair of the Ohio Senate Education Committee, said creating and vetting tests is a detailed, time-consuming process, but she said if Ohio has to switch, AIR may be the best place to go.

“I think in the end, what killed PARCC is that the brand was so badly damaged,” she said. “The word PARCC became synonymous with a nightmare test. And no matter how much they fixed the test, that was not going away.”

But not everyone is happy with the decision to ditch PARCC. Tom Lasley, former dean of the University of Dayton’s School of Education, has been a PARCC supporter because he said Ohio needed much more challenging tests.

“I understand the reasons and there were justifiably some concerns with PARCC,” Lasley said. “But I’m disappointed we didn’t give it another year and try to really fix PARCC.”

The PARCC tests were part of new graduation requirements, in which high school students need a certain combined score on end-of-course exams. Ohio Department of Education spokesman John Charlton said this year’s PARCC scores will count for graduation purposes, and AIR will create replacement exams that will fit into the state’s scoring matrix.

Because the tests will be new, schools and teachers will be protected from disciplinary consequences tied to 2015-16 test scores, according to ODE.

Exiting the PARCC consortium means Ohio will not be able to compare test scores to those in other states — a feature of PARCC that Ohio’s business community supported.

Since AIR already runs Ohio’s science and social studies tests, the company now will be the sole supplier of state exams used for school report cards and, eventually, teacher evaluations. Lehner and Ross both said AIR will provide test results to schools by June 30.

But Lehner said it’s a fair question whether a shorter test with a shorter grading window can accurately measure the deeper knowledge that Ohio is supposed to be pursuing via the Common Core.

Lehner wouldn’t go so far as to say the state had clearly failed Ohio students and schools with a years-long PARCC effort that cost millions of dollars. But she did cite plenty of problems — state inability to implement the tests smoothly, PARCC not meeting deadlines, the federal government imposing too many restrictions, and teachers creating unhealthy fear in the classroom because of their own fear of evaluation.

“I think there’s plenty of blame to go around,” Lehner said.

Interesting read:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/07/14/teacher-ive-loved-my-very-difficult-job-but-now-ohio-has-made-it-impossible/?utm_content=buffere6fcf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer